Yet another cease-fire agreement on Ukraine has been signed in Minsk. It went into effect Sunday amid low expectations of success.
This is the second such agreement to come out of Minsk. The previous deal was signed in September. It collapsed almost immediately. There is precious little confidence that Minsk II will pan out any better. The best that German Chancellor…

The outpouring of sympathy and support for the staff of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo has been enormous. Over a million people poured into the streets of Paris to protest the terrorist attack on its headquarters, a gathering said to be larger than when France celebrated the end of World War II. It appears to be a near universal statement of support for freedom of…

Suppose someone told you there were over two decades of economic data showing the secret of success for every nation in the world and that a Nobel laureate in economics inspired the methodology that was used to analyze that data.
Would you sit up and listen?
I hope so, because if you did, you would discover a lot about why some economies succeed while others…

It’s “historic.” A “landmark” breakthrough. By one stroke of the presidential pen, the tide of history has risen, never to recede again.
How many times has the press greeted a decision by President Obama with this breathless cry? It happened again last week when he reversed nearly 50 years of U.S. policy toward communist Cuba.
Columnist Eugene Robinson called the move a…

Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to have picked a bad time to try to restore the Russian empire. Collapsing energy prices are weakening the value of the ruble, causing inflation and depriving Mr. Putin of badly needed income.
We might expect his troubles to curb his appetite for aggression. Alas, it has not.
If anything, the former KGB operative is tightening the…

Presidents in recent decades carefully tried not to overstep their executive authority in domestic policy. They may have pushed the envelope on national security and war-making powers, but they were reluctant to take any executive action perceived to be a blatant rewriting of a law or a unilateral political move.
Part of the reason is Watergate. The abuse of executive…

Foreign affairs may not have played a big part in the midterm elections, but that doesn’t mean all is well with current foreign policy. A CBS poll the week before the election found only 34 percent of Americans approved of the president’s handling of foreign policy. Within our foreign policy establishment, there is widespread bipartisan unease about his inability to…

Iraq’s chemical weapons are back in the news. The New York Times reported that American troops found roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells and aviation bombs since the Iraq War began. Then last week The Washington Post reported the Islamic State had used chlorine gas against Iraqi police officers.
What’s going on? We’ve been told “Bush lied” about Iraq having weapons…

In our three previous installments we discussed how President Obama's six year experiment in retrenching American power has failed. It has created more global disorder, magnified threats to American security, and has shifted America's strategic posture in damaging ways that diminish our ability to shape the international environment. We also took stock of America's…

In our first two installments in this series on a foreign policy agenda for the 2016 presidential election, we described how threats to American security have grown over the past few years, and how American strategic deficiencies and policy missteps have in some cases exacerbated these threats. Global disorder is on the rise, and the United States' strategic posture has…

President Obama insulted many Americans last week when he raised events in Ferguson, Missouri, during his United Nations speech. They chafed at the implied moral equivalence of a shooting still in legal dispute with the many lethal foreign threats besieging the world. While such rhetoric is divisive at home, there is another problem. The president does not seem to…

In our first installment on the need to lay out a new foreign policy agenda for the 2016 presidential race, we described how the world has become a more dangerous place. We explained that while our current policies cannot be blamed entirely for the rising threats to American security, they have aggravated them and have even created new threats and problems. In this…

It’s no secret that threats to American security are increasing. The terrorism we thought had been contained is on the rise again. The Islamic State movement has threatened to take its war to New York. While the administration claims there is no actionable intelligence showing such a threat to be imminent, it’s no consolation to remember that we didn’t see the Sept. 11…

One of the lessons of statecraft is that mistakes tend to compound themselves. Good options disappear and bad ones proliferate. The hole is dug deeper because desperation convinces you to contemplate options that would never have been considered in better times.
This is what I fear may happen next in Iraq. Because we have so few good options, the Obama administration may…

Part One: Why It's Needed
It is a little more than two years before the next presidential election, but foreign policy might figure more prominently in the 2016 cycle than it has in recent elections. World events are deteriorating -- rapidly -- and national security is more on people's minds. There is widespread popular discontent with the current administration's…

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